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In its pursuit of global university rankings, Indonesia introduced a series of higher education policies, one in 2014 to grant autonomy to a select group of universities, and another in 2017 to tie financial and promotional incentives to scientific publications for all researchers. To examine scientific productivity surrounding these policies, we use bibliometric data from Scopus spanning three decades from 1990 to 2020. We investigate the patterns of publication and collaboration and analyze them across journal quartiles, academic fields, and researcher cohorts. Our findings reveal that publications increased dramatically for both autonomous and non-autonomous higher education institutions after 2014. Single-university authorship was common practice and skewed publication quality towards Q3 and Q4 journals, while co-authorships with foreign organizations pulled the shift towards Q1 journals consistently across all fields. New researchers starting in 2014 published fewer Q1 and more Q3 and Q4 publications than the earlier cohort. We highlight policy implications on the need for a balance between publication quantity and quality and call on Indonesian policymakers to introduce holistic higher education reforms rather than introducing reforms that focus on the performance of the university for ranking purposes.

To explore scientific mobility patterns, we leverage a rich bibliometric dataset on Taiwanese academia. We investigate the movement and productivity of 21,051 highly active researchers who published while affiliated with Taiwanese higher education institutions based on 30 years’ worth of publication and affiliation records from 1991 to 2020. The analysis shows evidence of brain drain in Taiwan since the 2010s, with the U.S. the top destination for researchers moving from Taiwan (as well as the largest source of inbound researchers). China comes a close second to the U.S. as the top destination for outbound scholars. Studying how Taiwan’s universities recruited talent after the country adopted the 2005 excellence initiative, we discover that the numbers of scholars recruited by World Class Universities (WCUs) and non-WCUs surpringly converge with WCUs exhibiting a dramatic decrease in new recruits. Our evidence uncovers that inbound scholars, after their move, are more productive than non-mobile colleagues; however, this effect declines over time. We discuss implications for the study of excellence initiatives, their (un)intended consequences, and mechanisms of talent circulation that greatly impact research production and research university development.